Why are you still acting like they're not doing it on purpose?
*shrug* Experience? House's persistent pseudointellectualism may have long since exhausted my patience and any right he had to the assumption of good faith, but Hanlon's Razor
does apply here. While his argumentation is significantly more grating than that of more honest posters, his posts read more like he's working backwards and trying to find support for a predetermined conclusion more than they do him simply trying to annoy. As I mentioned a few pages ago, they read very much like he desperately wants to believe that the conclusion that Trump couldn't have legitimately lost and is looking for an excuse to claim that the preconception is 'supported'. I don't think he increasingly keeps running to OANN (a network self-described as one of the "greatest supporters" of Trump), Right Side Broadcasting Network (a youtube channel that was built from the ground up as a promotion network for Trump) and Epoch Times (a paper run by a Falun Gong splinter whose driving principle is to promote that faith and write against the Chinese Communist Party, and which literally believes Trump is the functional equivalent of the faith's messiah who will lead the charge against the CCP in an imminent apocalypse) just for giggles. I think he's turning to them because they're the only ones ethically and journalistically bankrupt enough to tell him the lie he wanted to hear, which in his mind means that they're the only ones 'fighting for
his prejudices the truth'.
The guy is retreating further and further into his echo chamber, and rather blatantly falling for the old trap of mistaking "telling him what he wants to hear" with "trustworthiness". The moment they step out of lockstep with his preconceptions, they become persona non-grata. Hell, he slipped a while ago and more or less said it outright when he suggested that as far as he was concerned, William Barr (the man who has consistently been accused by DoJ alumni en masse as acting more as Trump's personal lawyer than Attorney General, and of practically weaponizing the DoJ for Trump's personal benefit) couldn't be trusted not to be turning a blind eye and acting against Trump because a few weeks ago the cult of Trump had deemed him
not loyal enough. Not to mince words, the actual facts of the matter don't really matter to him because he's fundamentally presenting an emotional argument rather than a logical one. Houseman and others like him are arguing more from gut feeling (more specifically, their dissatisfaction with the results) than logic, hence why any allegation of the impropriety that they want to see gets trumpeted as proof of the same. To put it more directly, to them something is 'true' if they think it vindicates their prejudices and 'false' if it contradicts them.
And because it's an argument rooted in emotion - not dissimilar to a temper tantrum, in fact (you know, standard "I lost? I can't have lost! They must have cheated! That was so unfair!" bullshit) - the search for truth is warped into a search for validation of his prejudices, something those sources are all too willing to exploit. Any data that they see as supporting the preconception is latched onto as ironclad proof that they were right, and any data that they see as dismissive on it is seen as unreasonably biased against their 'common sense' conclusion. And that's really about as much thought that goes into it. It's a song and dance we've seen many times before. We saw this exact same pattern with the 9/11 "Truthers", with the "Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts for profit" bullshit, with
Cdesign Proponentsists Creationists being "unfairly silenced" in academia, with QAnon, with Uranium One, with Burisma...the proponents of each of these desperately
wanted the allegations to be true because it appealed to their prejudices and resonated with them on an emotional level; it told them not only what they wanted to hear - that their prejudices were just 'telling it like it is' - but that they were smart for rejecting the 'mainstream narrative'. It's a very simple (though sadly also very common and often effective) tactic that appeals to their inner child. It not only makes them feel vindicated in their prejudice, but as a cherry on top gives them the satisfaction of feeling like they were part of some privileged secret club that was more enlightened than the unwashed and/or corrupt masses. Ironically, however, this perception is only made possible by taking advantage of their ignorance and near ubiquitous unwillingness to put in the legwork for independent verification.
Example: Houseman keeps crowing about Republicans "being escorted out to applause", implying it to be something widespread and endemic. What he refers to is an incident at the TCF Center on Nov 4 in which - at the prompting of a recent tweet from Trump - a group of Republicans circled the vote counters and started chanting "Stop the count" in an attempt at intimidating the counters into end the process prematurely. It's worth noting that not only were they escorted out for being legitimately disruptive and attempting to impede the process, but that escorting them out had no functional impact on the Republican challengers even in just that location, as at the time both Democrat and Republican challengers in that building numbered more than 200 each. Mind you, challengers were supposed to be capped at 135 per party, so you could have literally bled dozens of challengers on both sides of the aisle and still have been over the planned capacity. And we didn't see that volume of ejections. He also likes to bring up the grossly hyperbolic mischaracterization of Republicans being escorted out if their masks so much as slipped, which in actuality is based on another event at the same location wherein a woman was escorted out after she was asked and
refused to readjust her mask so that it would cover her nose. In both cases a singular event was misrepresented as an endemic one and ultimately presented the S.O.P. removal of disruptive/belligerent individuals as malicious targeting. This was achieved through removal of necessary context that is roughly on par with "Even Darwin admitted the eye couldn't have evolved".
But I don't see this as deliberate misinformation on House's part. I see it as reflective of his tendency to take the often hyperbolic (or flat out dishonest) tweets he's been grabbing from his echo chamber at face value and his typical unwillingness to actually scrutinize them, much less independently research the events the claims were made about. In both cases, he latched onto a hyperbolic tweet in which the tweeter was champing at the bit to find proof of their prejudice that Republicans would be unfairly targeted, and presented the events (bereft of context, as is so often the case with confirmation bias) as proof of such. House, of course, was looking for an excuse to believe the same and, as such, the allegation itself was all the proof he needed. He swallowed the mischaracterization hook, line, and sinker. He stubbornly refuses to hear otherwise because he's emotionally invested in that conclusion. He gives that much away through his objections. We've seen a few times now that if you tell him exactly how his sources misled him, he clutches his pearls and claims that you are simply prejudiced against the conclusion and simply 'buying the media narrative', maybe throwing in a false equivalence or suggestion that you're a hypocrite for daring to actually apply scrutiny to his claims and find them deficient. It's the same reaction we get when Creationists are told that there's no "controversy" to teach, or when you tell paranormal aficionados that claims of psychic power are not worth the paper they're printed on unless they can be reproduced in a controlled environment. The guy legitimately does not seem to understand the idea of independent research or vetting a claim, instead seeming to treat it as simply personal preference among necessarily partisan sources.
He is at fault for taking the tweets as gospel and jumping through all kinds of mental hoops to try and rationalize the bullshit he's swallowed, but fundamentally that boils down to him being gullible, lazy, and emotionally invested in the idea that Trump might somehow have actually won, rather than him being willfully deceitful. It's the same reason he takes as gospel Trump et al's lies that the courts haven't actually judged the merits of the evidence and dismissed the cases purely on technicality
when the goddamn rulings and court opinions explain exactly why that same purported evidence was little more than the affiants passing off their ignorant supposition as proof of fraud. The guy's shown on numerous occasions in this and other threads that he rarely bothers to read even his own sources to completion and instead relies on some rather dishonest sources to give him both the cliff notes and tell him what opinions he should hold. It's no stretch to surmise that he doesn't bother to seek out and look at the actual source material, and simply assumes that everyone else shares that bad habit. If you've been following his postings, I'm sure you've noticed that his response to being called out on his frequent ignorance is not to correct his lack of research, but instead to insinuate that the other poster(s) must share his intellectual laziness and were - like him - merely mindlessly regurgitating the claims of their favored outlets, thereby necessarily putting his claims and theirs on equal footing. Hence Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately be explained by stupidity".